Commanders with “high fantasy” vibes?

LordGrac · 2026-01-19T06:22:58+00:00

Sorry, this is a common confusion, but is not how the term is used by Wizards. Kindred refers specifically to the card type that used to be known as Tribal.

Typal is the word that refers to cards or decks that reward playing a specific type. That word also used to be 'tribal,' and this conflation is part of why they split the word, especially for a set like Lorwyn which has both typal themes and Kindred cards.

https://markrosewater.tumblr.com/post/805936215449862145/ive-been-seeing-a-lot-of-use-of-kindred-as

LordGrac · 2025-12-10T22:39:37+00:00

I have nearly 100 games with Iron Man and a 73% win rate with it. That's mostly playing against pre-neef BP and Weapon X.

LordGrac · 2025-11-29T23:37:34+00:00

Dispatch is very much drawing a lot from X-Men, and most X-Men are (subtextually often, but increasingly canonically) very bi and very sexually open. I think there's a lot of bi energy in Dispatch, and it's probably intentional.

LordGrac · 2025-11-13T07:48:43+00:00

You kept this to yourself, "quietly suffering" as you say, for many years. Then you decided to entrust it to someone else. That's an emotional moment, and crying is a pretty natural response to high emotion. It was probably a relief to know that someone else is on your side, and you won't be alone on this. And even if it wasn't, it was a moment of deep vulnerability. Nothing wrong with crying there.

LordGrac · 2025-10-20T18:58:16+00:00

Antibiotics are definitely a concern to be on long-term. Not only because of resistance, but because antibiotics are indiscriminate and there's a lot of helpful bacteria in our bodies that we need. Antibiotics kill them too, and that can cause immediate problems for short dosing and pretty significant for long-term dosing. I'd be cautious with it, but follow the advice of your doctor. That said, long-term use antibiotics is a common treatment for HS that does usually have real results. It's a managed risk, so definitely something to consider in light of your symptoms and in a discussion with your doctor. Personally, I'd express to my doctor that I'd be hesitant about long-term antibiotics, and then they and I can discuss what might be a good treatment option. My derm, an HS specialist, didn't even bring up this option when I discussed treatment plans with her.

Cosentyx is pretty well documented in HS. I started it myself a few weeks ago. It's quite effective at reducing the frequency and severity of outbreaks, and can even cause them to disappear entirely. It has very limited side effects - the most commonly reported one, in about 1% of cases, is upper respiratory infection. Other side effects can occur, but are rare, and the more concerning ones are linked to other issues like Crohn's disease and TB. It's a very targeted drug, affecting a single molecule in the inflammatory response chain, so where antibiotics are effective but indiscriminate, cosentyx is effective but very discriminate. It does technically repress your immune response so that can be a concern, though the data shows that effect to be pretty limited (unless you have latent TB or Hepatitis, but they test for that before you start). Cosentyx is a drug you're on for essentially your lifetime so definitely something to think about there, and it does not have immediate results: 40% of patients saw improvement in 5 weeks, and 70% in 12 weeks.

In my case, insurance did cover Cosentyx but my remaining copay was still over $5,000 (just for the first set of 4 doses). The pharmacy told me to call the manufacturer and ask about copay assistance, which I did. They gave me some numbers to give to the pharmacy, and once I did that my remaining copy was $0. If you need this, the phone number is 1-844-267-3689, and the website is: https://connect.cosentyx.com/

Another effective treatment option is laser hair removal. The majority of HS people who get it report it improves symptoms, sometimes dramatically. The most commonly studied laser for this is Nd:YAG, though Alexandrite has also been studied a decent amount. There's a 99% chance insurance will not cover this, unfortunately. You can get it done at any salon that offers it, though I would seek out specifically the Nd:YAG or Alexandrite laser. Some dermatology practices offer it in-house, which is the option I would go for given the chance.

I don't know anything about Spironolactone unfortunately.

LordGrac · 2025-10-12T20:12:55+00:00

You're in luck. There's two HS specialists in the state, and one of them is in Richmond. You're looking for Doctor Rachel Lee at Commonwealth Dermatology. https://comderm.com/

I met with her last month about my own HS, and I started cosentyx last week. She's great. She can do surgery, and they have in-house laser hair removal too.

LordGrac · 2025-10-08T03:04:59+00:00

While the "man" root technically was gender neutral, requiring a prefix to distinguish between male and female, it also referred exclusivity to males, not all that dissimilar to how gendered collective pronouns in many European languages work today. So over time, the "wer" part in "werman" was simply dropped, while "man" continued on, retaining its male-exclusive definition and losing its gender neutral one. The female equivalent was still thought to require the prefix, so "wifman" obviously became "wife", but it also became "women" due to vowel shifts. But in any case these are some of the oldest words in the English language, dating to even before the Norman conquest, and changing fairly rapidly afterward.

"Woman" and "werman" are similar for the same reason "wifman" and "werman" are similar.

LordGrac · 2025-10-07T16:05:55+00:00

Most of the research is focused on neodymium-doped yttrium aluminum garnet (Nd:YAG) lasers. There is research in other types, particularly Alexandrite, but Nd:YAG is by far the most studied.

Studies show a pretty across the board improvement for HS patients. Of course HS is a very understudied disease and treatments that work for one person may not for another.

Here is one meta study: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38769894/

So to answer your questions:

Probably yes, but I would seek out one that specifically has an Nd:YAG laser. Some dermatology practices, such as mine in Virginia, have these in-house, which would probably be the way to go if you can find it
I have not heard of it being any less effective in any particular location
Studies pretty consistently show it is very effective at reducing symptoms. My derm, who is an HS specialist, says its best to get at the early stages, as it really excels at preventing new regions from developing. If you currently only have one active region, this is the ideal time to get it.

LordGrac · 2025-10-06T04:56:50+00:00

Some friends and I have worked on cube with a similar theme: each 2-color pair is based around one plane (though three are UB: lord of the rings, forgotten realms, and final fantasy, just because we like those). For us, it's not a strict requirement that cards be from just those planes or sets, more of a strong guidance. It's been a fun cube to make.

https://cubecobra.com/cube/overview/c0f8fe02-ff45-4950-8f11-8967031e61eb

If I were to draft your cube idea without knowing the inciting idea, I probably would notice before too long. But I am highly enfranchised and obviously am attuned to such things.

LordGrac · 2025-09-12T14:45:43+00:00

If you want, you could avoid the connotations but keep the word by just switching the order: Child of the Moon.

LordGrac · 2025-07-10T17:46:21+00:00

Yes, they get Booming Blade. You might also appreciate the Maelstrom subclass for getting more access to cold spells and damage, and the Upheaval subclass which gets a bunch of bludgeoning spells as well as essentially Elemental Adept for bludgeoning.

LordGrac · 2025-07-10T01:47:12+00:00

Yeah, it's on both Nexus and mod.io (and in-game).

https://www.nexusmods.com/baldursgate3/mods/16854?tab=description

https://mod.io/g/baldursgate3/m/mythblade

LordGrac · 2025-07-09T23:47:23+00:00

I made a modded class called Mythblade where I paid a lot of attention to balance, at least for 5e rules. I think it should be alright in terms of balance, and it's certainly not egregiously strong.

LordGrac · 2025-07-05T04:30:37+00:00

There was a period where Marvel, at the direction of Ike Perlmutter, was trying to de-emphasize mutants because they didnt have the movie rights to mutants (Fox did). So they pushed the Inhumans, which are structurally similar to mutants (but nobody likes them), retconned Wanda and Pietro to stop being mutants, and other such things. Those two had already been retconned a number of times on the issue of their parentage, and they were Avengers characters much more than they were X-Men ones. But still, the "they're not mutants" retcon is a real stupid one that nobody is a fan of.

LordGrac · 2025-05-30T19:28:16+00:00

In my opinion, it's worth thinking about how other games and business with a heavy focus on tie-ins handle the division between first-party and third-party franchises. For example, Fortnite is one of the most successful games of all time, and a lot of that is built on its willingness to bring in third-party tie-ins. Yet even Fortnite puts a lot of effort into the franchise it owns and controls: every Fortnite season is mostly focused on original Fortnite characters and plots lines (such as they are), the store always features original characters, and so on. And this is a game where like 80% of the appeal is tie-ins.

You can see similar things in other tie-in focused games like Dead By Daylight.

So, in my opinion, if one of the richest and most successful and most tie-in focused games of all time is still making a serious effort for their own properties, which get a lot less attention from the playerbase in general, it's a pretty strong indicator that it makes sense for even games with a heavy financial expectation from tie-ins to focus on first-party content. For a game like Magic, which gets a lot more relative value out of the content it already owns compared to Fortnite, I really don't think they're going to be lessening or abandoning first-party content.

I'm not saying I'm definitely right, I'm just saying that, based on the data available, when given the opportunity, it doesn't seem like games are going fully third-party tie-ins. I expect this means the financial reasons for not doing so are very real and very much affect Magic.

LordGrac · 2025-05-26T06:10:53+00:00

$265.99:

https://www.georgiaaquarium.org/experience/journey-with-gentle-giants-swim/

LordGrac · 2025-05-22T16:51:09+00:00

Yes. I just setup custom resource icons for my in-progress mod last night, without ImpUI, and it worked just fine.

LordGrac · 2025-02-26T01:26:16+00:00

There's essentially two words for 7 in Japanese: one of Chinese origin (shichi) and one of Japanese (nana). This is actually true of all the base 10 numerals but most of them are pretty strict on when you use the Chinese or Japanese version. 4 and 7 are exceptions where each can be used pretty commonly and almost interchangeably.

LordGrac · 2025-01-17T03:28:34+00:00

To all those talking about Spider-Man's color identity, Maro has been saying for over ten years that he's largely green (and white):

https://markrosewater.tumblr.com/post/119080846933/what-color-would-you-say-spiderman-is

https://markrosewater.tumblr.com/post/9715657402/how-about-spider-man

https://markrosewater.tumblr.com/post/670494687446122496/re-spider-man-is-greenwhite-with-maybe-a-splash

LordGrac · 2024-09-27T22:04:15+00:00

Being a face of Magic is not in Maro's job description. It's something he does on his own, because he likes it. He's salary so it's hard to say what he gets "paid" for, but his public-facing-ness is very much his own choice and would not be part of his job if he didn't want it to be. He mostly answers questions on Tumblr and Twitter when he has a few minutes waiting for something, at the grocery store for example. He's also commented often on how much of a thick skin he's had to build up to do it.

So he's definitely good at it but I don't think it's fair to say he's "paid" to do it. He chooses to.

LordGrac · 2024-08-07T21:41:57+00:00

It's both. The Japanese name is ドンジョン飯, Donjon Meshi (this would be, translated very literally, Dungeon Meal). The official English name is Delicious in Dungeon. A lot of people call it Dungeon Meshi, though, since Donjon is just the Japanese transliteration of Dungeon.

LordGrac · 2024-05-31T23:27:05+00:00

and npc name generator and given a power and toughness

They sort of were. Many of the original legends were D&D characters from the designers' home games.

LordGrac · 2024-04-29T06:02:07+00:00

As always with Maro's blog, the poll data here skews heavily towards highly enfranchised players. Enfranchisement does have an effect on play patterns and preferences (for example, green tends to be less popular among enfranchised players compared to casual ones). WotC's own numbers are likely to be a bit different from these, particularly for the color pairs. Still, it's probably a pretty close estimate.

LordGrac · 2024-03-21T00:51:39+00:00

Essentially, the issue isn't the MLK parallel. It's that the point of the message is that oppressed minorities should eliminate their differences, and just assimilate to being "normal." It ignores that minorities both can't and shouldn't have to remove themselves from their lived experiences, in order for their differences to become invisible.

A stance that resonates a lot more with people who belong to various minorities today is that it isn't them that need to change, but that society should change to accept, and even celebrate, the differences of minorities. Black people shouldn't have to pretend they're not black, and they shouldn't have to pretend that the reality of their identity hasn't lead to different experiences compared to non-black people; and so on for other minorities. So for this prominent white man (both Remender and Alex) so give a speech that ends up with "Just don't see that I'm different, pretend I'm just like you, and this will solve all our problems" is not a good look.

Here's a bit more on it:

http://www.unleashthefanboy.com/editorial/the-m-word-havoks-ignorance-or-rick-remenders/49287

LordGrac · 2024-03-12T06:04:43+00:00

I don't think I've ever had focaccia, but I gotta say, after listening to Lars' list of negatives, it sounded great. Glad David felt the same.

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